


The Adventures of Soft Grunge Montparnasse and Seapunk Éponine

by mikkey_bones



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Abandonment Issues, Alternate Universe - Hipsters, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Fuckbuddies, Hair Dye, Indie Music, Oversized Plaid Shirts, Recreational Drug Use, Soft Grunge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-19
Updated: 2013-01-19
Packaged: 2017-11-26 00:37:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/644638
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mikkey_bones/pseuds/mikkey_bones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Montparnasse knows the boundaries and the extent of their relationship, and he accepts it: they use each other because the alternatives just aren’t available.  Like when you can’t get your drug of choice and have to settle for the shitty half-price stuff, Montparnasse thinks, but that’s been happening to him less and less frequently lately.  He’s on the up-and-up.</p><p><i>or</i>, Montparnasse helps Éponine dye her hair.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Adventures of Soft Grunge Montparnasse and Seapunk Éponine

**Author's Note:**

> Once again inspired by overlong conversations with [Ali](poisonandperfection.tumblr.com) about a modernized, hipsterfied _Les Misérables_. "Soft grunge Montparnasse" is wholly her responsibility.
> 
>  **CONTENT WARNINGS** for _mentions_ of self-harm, drug (ab)use, alcohol (ab)use, and eating disorders.
> 
> I used the accent for Éponine's name because I am obnoxious.

Montparnasse helps Éponine dye her hair.  She is naturally a brunette, so they have to bleach it first.  He puts on the latex gloves and lathers on the bleach, taking extra care near her scalp, because he knows how much it burns.

While they wait for her hair to lighten, Montparnasse puts on the newest LP from _the xx_ , because he’s been waiting to listen to it for ages and it’s that or _MS MR_ , because those are the bootlegs he’s downloaded recently.  And Éponine has never liked _MS MR_.

 _And every day I’m learning about you the things that no one else sees,_ Jamie Smith croons on the speakers.  _And the end comes too soon, like dreaming of angels_.

Montparnasse stares at the (stolen) stereo; Éponine examines her hair in the mirror.

“You’re sure we can’t smoke,” Montparnasse asks flatly, even though Éponine forbade it before they even mixed up the bleach.

Sure enough, she gives him a scathing look in the mirror.  “Don’t be an idiot,” she says.  “I don’t know what the fuck kind of chemicals are in this, but it smells bad enough already without the weed.”

It smells bad enough Montparnasse would hazard a guess that the smell of weed would greatly improve the atmosphere.  But he doesn’t want anything horrific to happen, like the creation of poisonous gas or Éponine’s hair to catch on fire.  The latter would be almost amusing, actually, but not in Montparnasse’s apartment.  The landlord would probably not be so lenient about fire damages from this sort of thing.

The music is perfect for getting high, though.  He’s already sitting on the floor by the speaker; it doesn’t take much effort to slide down bonelessly to lie on the floor.

Éponine exits the bathroom, leaning against the door to watch him.  “You know I hate it when you do that,” she says.

“What?” Montparnasse asks, and then realize he’s gotten out his switchblade and is playing with it.  He hadn’t even noticed.  “Oh.”  He looks at the silvery blade, catches the metal between his thumb and finger, avoiding the sharpened edges.  “This isn’t the one I do it with, you know,” he comments.

“I don’t care,” Éponine says, and she looks stubborn enough that Montparnasse eventually flicks the blade back into the hilt and pockets it again.

“I use a box cutter on myself,” Montparnasse adds unnecessarily, because he enjoys watching Éponine squirm.  And she doesn’t disappoint; she makes a series of faces and then moves back into the bathroom, turning her back on him.

For anything that people might say about Éponine’s face, she’s got a nice silhouette, Montparnasse thinks, though a tad undernourished and, right now, stupid looking in the plastic garbage bag she’s wearing as a cape to keep the bleach off her clothing.  He puts his arms behind his head, using them as a pillow as he watches her shamelessly.  He knows the boundaries and the extent of their relationship, and he accepts it: they use each other because the alternatives just aren’t available.  Like when you can’t get your drug of choice and have to settle for the shitty half-price stuff, Montparnasse thinks, but that’s been happening to him less and less frequently lately.  He’s on the up-and-up.

“So what do you think about this album?” he asks, when it appears that Éponine isn’t going to restart the conversation any time soon.

Éponine shrugs, not facing him.

Montparnasse sighs.  If he didn’t have to deal with Éponine on a regular basis... his life would be a lot calmer, he thinks.  But then again, calm is very similar to boring.  “I haven’t done it in months,” he says.

She turns to look at him, appearing (appropriately) dubious.  “Months?”

Montparnasse nods, and it’s very nearly true; he’s replaced his nastier habits with some less nasty ones, like drugs and alcohol.  The sorts of things that kill you from the inside out and, in doing so, involve a lot less blood.  “On my honor,” he can’t resist adding, and Éponine turns away in disgust.  They both know about what his honor is worth.

“You still post pictures on your blog,” she says accusingly, not looking at him.

“They’re not of me,” Montparnasse replies.  It’s all part of recovery, anyway.  He can look at the stuff longer and longer without wanting to do it himself, and it’s still artistically pleasing, he thinks.  Maybe that’s twisted.

Éponine certainly thinks it’s twisted.  She rolls her eyes and finally turns to face him, still looking disgusted.  “You’re scum,” she says.

“You’re hardly better,” Montparnasse adds.  They both know why she’s here – why she spends most of her time here at Montparnasse’s apartment, actually, and it’s not because they like each other.  It’s a business deal, more like, and Éponine prefers Montparnasse’s place to the shitty hovel in which her father and siblings live.  Montparnasse doesn’t blame her.

“Shut the fuck up,” Éponine says with more weariness than venom, really.  “There’s fifteen more minutes for the bleach,” she adds.

Montparnasse sighs.  “Sit down,” he says.  “Or something.”

Éponine takes a seat on the edge of the bathtub.  Montparnasse can see her knees, her shoulders, and her wrist and hands from his angle; the rest is obscured by the door frame.  She keeps turning her phone over and over in her grasp, checking the time obsessively.

“So,” Montparnasse says.  No answer.  “How was school?”  Éponine is taking classes at the community college downtown.  “Boring?  Did you skip?”

“No,” Éponine says monosyllabically.

Montparnasse sighs and wants to ask about smoking again, but holds his tongue.  He sighs and stares at the ceiling. _The xx_ go on and on, hypnotic lyrics merging with into an incomprehensible chant.  Why isn’t he high?  “So,” he tries again.  “Why green?  Teal, whatever.”

“I like it,” Éponine says, apparently stubborn in her unwillingness to add anything constructive to the conversation.

Montparnasse’s fingers itch for something to do.  Usually, he plays with his switchblade or lights up a smoke, but neither option is available to him right now.  “I’m sorry I called you trashy,” he says after a while.

He watches as Éponine’s hands still, the cell phone coming to rest cradled between them.  “Okay,” she says.

“Okay,” Montparnasse repeats, closing his eyes.  Jamie Smith’s voice washes over him:

 _Do you still believe in you and me?_  
Are we all that we could be?  
Is it meant to be?

“It’s time,” Éponine says after a while.  Montparnasse opens his eyes slowly.  He was almost asleep.  “Come on,” she says, and Montparnasse watches her face come into view as she stands.  “Put the gloves back on.”

Montparnasse grumbles and gets to his feet, making a face as he steps into the bathroom, which has been overrun by bleach fumes.  “You’re taking out the trash today,” he says as he slips the bleach covered gloves back on.  After a moment’s thought, he turns on the sink and sticks his hands under the water to get off the excess bleach, acutely aware of Éponine’s gaze on him in the mirror.

“Okay, bend down,” Montparnasse says finally, turning to her.  “Let me see if it’s light enough.”

“How light does it need to be?” Éponine asks, but she bows her head anyway.  Montparnasse wipes some of the bleach mixture off a strand of hair near her scalp.  The color has faded out to a nice yellow – not too dark, but not too light.

“I think it’s good,” he says.  He’s honestly only done this a couple of times, and to his own hair, which is considerably darker and harder to dye than Éponine’s.  Once, he made it all blue; another time, he attempted to dye it silver but ended up with a dark gray sort of color that he changed back as soon as possible.  “We can wash it off in the bathtub.”

He keeps the gloves on as he turns on the water, and Éponine kneels on the bathroom rug, sticking her hair underneath.

“Shut your eyes,” Montparnasse says, because he doesn’t want to spend his evening finding out exactly what hair bleach does to an eyeball.  He carefully smoothes the bleach mixture out of Éponine’s hair, massaging her scalp with his fingers like he’s shampooing.  When he was a kid, Montparnasse’s mother worked at a beauty salon.  He would sit in the waiting area and watch her put her hands in strangers’ hair for hours on end.  Éponine isn’t a stranger.

The bleach is a nasty gray foam that washes down the drain.  Montparnasse moves Éponine so that her neck is bent lower and her head is further under the water, so he can get the back of her neck just to be sure.  He cleans his glove and then turns off the water, adding unnecessarily, “You can sit up now.”

The water is dripping down Éponine’s neck but her face is mostly dry.  Montparnasse grabs a towel, with which she wipes her forehead and cheeks before wrapping around her neck.  “Now the dye?” she asks.

“First we have to keep it from getting all over your skin,” Montparnasse says, and rummages around on the bathroom counter.  Vaseline would be ideal, but who the fuck has Vaseline just lying around?  He makes do with his greasiest, most heavy duty hand cream, which he smears across Éponine’s forehead and around her ears.

She makes disgusted faces and tenses like she’s about to pull away from him.  “That’s fucking gross,” she says.

“It’s this or walking around your school with green skin,” Montparnasse says, grabbing her by the back of the neck to keep her head still as he finishes with the lotion.  “You can wash it off when you’re done.”

Éponine submits, though she doesn’t look happy about it.  “Now is it time to put the dye in?”

Montparnasse nods.  He wipes his gloved hands on the towel around her neck and reaches for the box of teal hair dye.

“Will it work if we put this in when my hair is wet?” Éponine frets.  Now that Montparnasse isn’t hovering around her anymore, she’s standing up and looking at herself in the mirror, frowning and turning her head from side to side.  She wants to see if she looks any good as a blonde, Montparnasse imagines.  (She doesn’t, really.)

“Probably,” he replies, opening the tube of dye.  It’s liquid and dark, which means it’s going to make a huge mess.  “Sit down again.”

Éponine sits.  “Do you think it will look good?” she asks, her face about level with Montparnasse’s stomach as he uncaps the tube of dye and squeezes a large amount in her hair.

“If it doesn’t, you can just dye it back,” Montparnasse says.  He begins massaging the dye into her hair from root to tip, piling the long hair on top of her head to keep it off the back of her neck.  There’s going to be some stains on her skin in spite of the hand cream, but those will come out within the week.

“Either way, my dad won’t be happy.”

 _If he notices,_ Montparnasse thinks but doesn’t say aloud.  He squeezes more dye into her hair and rubs it in.  A strand of hair falls against Éponine’s ear; Montparnasse doesn’t rescue it in time and it leaves a blue-green stain.  He squeezes the rest of the dye onto the top of her head, smoothing it around with his gloved hands, then steps back to admire his work.  Éponine looks rather like those paintings of fancy queens with hair piled all on top of their heads.  Only the queens weren’t wearing garbage bag capes.

On the stereo, _the xx_ album finishes, and doesn’t restart.  Montparnasse washes off his gloves in the sink again before removing them.  “Got any CD’s?” he asks Éponine.  Sometimes she has interesting stuff, from her friends or lifted from the shop counter.

“Not today,” she says.  She’s looking hard at herself in the mirror like she wants to accelerate the dying process or, more like, change into someone else in the blink of an eye.  “Don’t play that kind of shit again, it was boring.”

Montparnasse would have hit about anyone else who said that.  He’s touchy about his music taste.  But he just gives Éponine a disgusted look before kicking around in his pile of bootlegs, finding an EP by Sky Ferreira, which isn’t exactly what he wants, but will have to do for now.  It’s probably something Éponine would like better anyway.  He switches that CD with _the xx_ and lets it start playing.

“And I still can’t smoke?” he asks, as Ashleigh Ball’s voice fills the room, matched with a driving beat.

“No,” Éponine snaps.  “God, your music sucks.”

“I’ll kick you out,” Montparnasse replies, but the threat is empty.  Since he can’t smoke, and Éponine doesn’t like it when he brings out his knives, he fishes around in his bag for one of his MacBooks instead.  This one, he stole from underneath a bathroom stall, when its occupant was distracted.  With the people he knows, it was child’s play to get into the system and reconfigure it for his own personal use.  He prefers Macs to Windows anyway, obviously, though he has a few of those too (in various states of repair and mostly waiting to be sold).

He checks on his blog, which is getting progressively more famous.  Some of it is his own photography (pictures taken on a stolen Nikon DSLR), but he also collects and _curates_ (he says because it sounds fancy) content from all over the internet.  Although Montparnasse has no qualms about stealing objects or music or movies, he is a bit of a stickler about intellectual property and always makes sure his pictures are nicely sourced.

 _fucking hate it when my friends have shitty music taste_ , he posts, sans capitalization or punctuation, knowing that Éponine will see it later.  She’d probably prefer they be listening to Nicki Minaj or Azalea Banks or he doesn’t even know what else, but this is his apartment, and she hasn’t brought him any new CD’s in a while.

“How long on the hair?” he asks, glancing over his shoulder.  She’s sitting on the edge of the bathtub still, and from here he can only see her hands, cradling her phone once more.

“I don’t know,” Éponine says irritably.  More of her body comes into view as she leans forward to grab the hair dye box from the bathroom counter, turning it over to read the instructions.  “Thirty minutes to an hour,” she says.

“Forty-five minutes,” Montparnasse declares, then looks back down at his computer, scrolling through all the posts in his tracked tags that have accumulated while he was gone.  Right now, he tracks the ‘soft grunge’ tag, the ‘smoke’ tag, and the ‘roses’ tag.  They don’t often have good posts, but Montparnasse takes what he can get.

He’s queuing up a few filtered pictures of flowers when Éponine’s phone starts ringing.  It’s some tacky rap ringtone and startles him.  It startles Éponine too, because she drops the phone onto the bathroom floor.  Montparnasse watches as she maneuvers carefully to pick it back up without making the pile of hair on her head fall down.  He doesn’t offer to help.

“Who was it?” he asks when she silences the cell phone without picking it up.

“Dad,” Éponine says shortly.  Montparnasse doesn’t pry into her personal life but he does happen to know a lot about it; he lives with Éponine, after all.  He knows, for example, that Éponine hasn’t been talking to her father for several weeks, though she will always pick up calls from her siblings.  “Wonder what he wanted.”

Montparnasse turns back to his computer.  “You could have answered and asked him yourself,” he points out.  Sky Ferreira’s voice is poppy enough to be annoying, and all Montparnasse really wants to do is listen to that _MS MR_ album but Éponine would bitch incessantly about that.  He’s also going through the ‘smoke’ tag, which probably wasn’t the best idea when he’s forbidden from lighting up for the next half hour.  It’s making his fingers twitchy.

“Got any plans tonight?” he asks and exits Tumblr, because he’ll just get progressively more annoyed if he stays online.  He checks his Facebook offhandedly.

“No,” Éponine says after a long and very suspicious pause.  “I can stay here, right?” she asks.  Montparnasse looks up to see her nervously tapping the touch screen of her cell phone with her magenta-painted nails.

“Yeah, whatever,” Montparnasse says.  Sometimes he wishes he wasn’t so bad at making small talk, but he honestly doesn’t care.  Done with Facebook, he shuts his MacBook with a sigh, casting about for something else to do with his hands while he waits.  Sky Ferreira isn’t helping to relax him.  He punches the EJECT button on the stereo with his index finger, and puts in Halfaxa by Grimes instead.  It’s old but still good to listen to, and something that’s guaranteed to be calming.

Éponine sighs loudly from the bathroom.  “Your music just got shittier,” she says.

Montparnasse ignores her, lying on his back on the rug.  Instead of pulling his switchblade from his pocket, he pulls out his phone and checks his text messages.  There’s nothing new, just the few texts from Claquesous he received hours ago.

He yawns, contemplates eating for a while, even though all they have is Goldfish and half a bottle of rum, and finally admits defeat.  “I’m bored,” he tells Éponine.

“At least your hair doesn’t smell like a chemical factory,” Éponine replies unsympathetically from the bathroom.

“That’s your own fault,” Montparnasse replies.  He slips his phone back into his pocket and sits up.  “You sure I can’t smoke?” he says because it can’t hurt to ask.

“Shut up,” Éponine says.

“How long has it been?”

“Fifteen minutes,” Éponine replies irritably.  “What the hell is wrong with you?”

Montparnasse wonders if it’s weird to other people, to people who aren’t him, that he’s been without a cigarette or a joint for a little over two hours and already has a burning need to smoke something.  He doesn’t care.  “I’m going outside,” he says, standing fluidly and pausing only to grab his jacket from where it’s slung carelessly over a chair.  He shuts the door behind him.  If Éponine says anything as he leaves, he doesn’t hear it.

His apartment is on the third floor of a shitty three-floor apartment building, and his front door opens onto a walkway, like a cheap motel.  When he moved in, there was a flowerpot filled with dirt outside his door.  Now it’s filled with cigarette butts.

When Montparnasse has a choice, he smokes cheap menthol cigarettes.  He’s no connoisseur, and has in fact come to like the taste.  He throws his jacket on and digs into the pockets for the battered box and his silver Zippo lighter.  It’s stolen, of course, like most of his belongings.

As he smokes, Montparnasse watches the parking lot below him and the bus stop across the street.  People get shot around there occasionally.  Never him, he’s too smart for that.  He’s too smart for all of this, actually, which is why he’ll be out of here soon.

He finishes the cigarette while he’s dwelling on the tantalizing prospects of the future, and stubs it out against the wall behind him before tossing the butt in the flowerpot.  Then, since he still has some time, he lights a second cigarette.

His phone vibrates while he’s wondering why so many bands lately have names that start with _M_.  (Perhaps it’s an omen.  His name begins with _M_ too, after all.)  It’s Éponine.

 _where r u_?

Montparnasse rolls his eyes.  _outside smoking dipshit_ he texts back.

_u left and didn’t come back_

Rolling his eyes, Montparnasse drops his cigarette to the ground and grinds it under his heel before slipping inside, tossing his jacket back on the chair.  “What?” he calls to the bathroom.  “Thought I’d up and left, like your mom?”

“Shut the fuck up,” Éponine says from the bathroom.  Montparnasse peeks in.  She’s where he left her, hair still piled up on her head like Marie Antoinette or something, and when she sees him looking she gives him the finger.

“Think it’s done?” Montparnasse asks.

Éponine shrugs.

Montparnasse watches her for a while, then moves into the bathroom, putting on the latex gloves again.  “Lean forward a little,” he says, and she complies reluctantly.  He examines her hair.  It looks dark greenish-blue now, almost black, but it’s always going to be dark with the dye in.  “I think it’s good,” he says.

“Okay,” Éponine replies.  “I’ll wash it out.”  She turns on the faucet in the bathtub.

Montparnasse steps back and washes as she ducks her hair under the tap.  “It’s probably best to shower and shampoo,” he suggests.  “After you get most of it out.  You’ll be in there for a while.”

“Okay,” Éponine repeats sullenly, her voice muffled by the sound of running water.  The water turns teal with excess dye as soon as it touches her hair, and runs in dark streams down the drain.  This is going to take a while, Montparnasse thinks.  He removes his gloves – tossing them into the trashcan; they won’t need them anymore – and goes back into the main room.  Grimes is getting old.  He’s debating between _MTSRKRFT_ and _Ratatat_ , both pretty old, but eventually decides in favor of _Ratatat_ , which suits the fall weather better.

When he comes back to the bathroom, Éponine is still rinsing out her hair, but there’s less color in the water.  He moves over a pile of beauty products and takes a seat on the counter.  “You can probably dry it off and shower now.”  The water’s almost clear.  He can barely hear _Ratatat_ from the other room, even though he turned up the stereo.  How annoying.

Éponine ignores him, rinsing her hair for a few more minutes before moving her head out from under the faucet and squeezing it out.  “Hand me a towel,” she says.

Montparnasse grabs the nearest one and tosses it to her.  Éponine catches it and wraps it around her hair in that way that makes it look like she’s wearing a turban.  Montparnasse has never figured out how girls do that.

When her hair is out of the way, Éponine struggles out of her garbage-bag cape, wadding that up and dropping it onto the floor.  Then she unbuttons her dark blue skinny jeans and drops her pants.  She raises an eyebrow at Montparnasse.  “Do you mind?”

Montparnasse raises an eyebrow right back at her.  “Do _you_ mind?”

She shrugs and turns her back to him, getting to work unbuttoning her overlarge plaid shirt.  It’s definitely a men’s shirt and might be something borrowed from Montparnasse’s closet.  He hopes it’s not.  He likes to think he’d never wear something so tacky.

Underneath her clothing Éponine is mostly skin and bones.  At first, Montparnasse (when he began exploring various blogs) thought she might be anorexic.  But it’s not like she’s trying to lose weight.  It’s just that she never has enough to eat.  Her shoulder blades poke out in her back when she takes off her bra and drops that to the floor too.

Montparnasse isn’t even turned on anymore – they live like a brother and sister now, or rather, as almost-siblings who occasionally fuck, but Éponine’s body is just Éponine’s body.

If Montparnasse is good at anything, it’s disassociating.

Éponine turns on the water, which masks _Ratatat_ ’s haunting electronic melodies.  As soon as she steps behind the shower curtain and pulls it shut, Montparnasse fishes his switchblade from his pocket, flicking it open and closed over and over again.

After a while, he pauses with the switchblade open and presses it against the meat of his palm, hard enough to feel it but lightly enough that it doesn’t draw blood.  “Sorry I insulted your family,” he says.

There’s a long enough pause that Montparnasse isn’t sure Éponine heard.  Eventually, when he’s about to repeat himself, she says, “Okay.”

Montparnasse takes the blade away from his hand and closes it.  “We good?”

“Okay,” Éponine says.  “I think my hair is green now.”

“Green?” Montparnasse asks and slips the blade back into his pocket.  “Or teal?”

The shower turns off and Éponine steps out.  “What do you think?” she asks.

First of all, Montparnasse hands her the towel.  She squeezes her hair, which is dark, but in a different way.  “It’s hard to tell when it’s wet.”

“Then we’ll wait,” she says, and wraps her hair up in the towel turban again.  Without being asked, Montparnasse hands her another towel, and she wraps it around her body.  “I hope it worked,” she says.

“Why did you want to change your hair?” Montparnasse asks.  He’s asked before but she hasn’t yet given him a straight answer.

Éponine shrugs.  She’s thin enough that her collarbones jut out and make it a dramatic gesture.  “I thought it’d look nice.  Girls on your blog always have colored hair.”

Montparnasse stands and moves to the main room, where he can listen to _Ratatat_ with better acoustics.  “Can we smoke yet?” he asks.  He knows the answer but it doesn’t hurt to ask.

“You just smoked,” Éponine says, following him out of the bathroom.

“ _Not_ cigarettes,” Montparnasse says.

“No,” Éponine replies.  She goes down the hall to the bedroom, presumably to forage for more clothes.  “Not when my hair’s wet.”

There’s a moratorium on ‘smoking with wet hair’ in the apartment and Montparnasse is ninety-nine percent sure it’s just due to some made up neurosis of Éponine’s, but it sort of makes sense, in a pseudoscientific, probably dumb way, which is the only reason he obeys it.

He sighs.  “You don’t have to put on clothes,” he tells Éponine.  He’s mostly joking.  The only thing he really wants to do right now is smoke.

“Fuck off,” she says.

Montparnasse shrugs, and ignores her in favor of the music.  He enjoys _Ratatat_ ; they were one of his first favorite bands, back when he started getting into music.  He stole a _Ratatat_ vinyl record in eighth grade to prove that he could.  He still has it; he put it on his wall.

When Éponine comes out of the bedroom, she’s wearing another oversized plaid shirt, this time with black leggings and wool socks.  Montparnasse knows she gets all her clothing dirt cheap – thrift stores, hand-me-downs – but she tries very hard to be on the cutting edge of fashion at the same time.  And right now, fashion _is_ thrift store stuff anyway.  Montparnasse has a blog, he’s heard that stupid Macklemore song, he knows.

Éponine’s hair is wrapped up in a towel turban.  “I’m going to go blow dry it,” she says.

“Okay,” Montparnasse replies.  She disappears into the bathroom.  He turns up the stereo before _Ratatat_ ’s “Party with Children” is drowned out completely by the noise of the hairdryer.

 _I’ve been thinking what to do with my future_ , the song says.

Montparnasse gets to his feet laboriously and walks into the bathroom, where Éponine is blow drying her hair.  The process looks very labor intensive, and Montparnasse ducks behind her and sits on closed toilet in order to avoid the hot, shampoo-scented air.  As Éponine’s hair gets drier, the teal coloring shows up more clearly.

When Montparnasse colored his hair blue, Guelemer had punched him too hard in the shoulder (it left a mark for weeks) and Babet called him names.  He didn’t dye it back, though; he knew Patron-Minette needed him to be worth anything.  And they still did.

Montparnasse wonders what Thénardier will do when he sees his daughter’s new hair.  Éponine looks happy for now, at least; she's looking at herself flirtatiously in the mirror like Montparnasse isn’t even around.  Even after she turns off the hairdryer, she still spends time lifting up her hair, letting it fall down, turning her head from side to side and watching how the color changes in the light.

“The dye worked,” Montparnasse says, because he doesn’t like being ignored.  He stands.

Éponine turns to look at him.  “What do you think?” she asks.

“I just said,” Montparnasse replies.  “The dye worked.”  He reaches out and picks up a strand of hair, watching as it gleams in the light.  Getting the shimmery dye was a good idea.

“No,” Éponine says, and grabs his wrist.  “How does it _look_?  On me.”  She meets his eyes stubbornly.  She knows he always tells the truth about her appearance, to the point of being brutal.  Montparnasse is surprised she asked.

But at the same time... “It looks good,” he says.  “Really good, actually,” because though Éponine’s face isn’t all that pretty, and her body (and taste in music) leave a lot to be desired, this is a good color on her.  It’s fitting.

Éponine drops Montparnasse’s wrist and gives him a smile that lights up her entire face.  “Does it?  You’re serious?” she asks, her tone incredulous.  Sometimes Montparnasse forgets how low Éponine’s self-esteem actually is; moments like this remind him.

“Yeah,” he replies.  He could kiss her right now, and she’d kiss back.  It would be like that perfectly romantic moment in all of the stupid movies she watches.

But Montparnasse doesn’t kiss her, because that’s not the sort of thing he does.  On the stereo, the _Ratatat_ album is done.  He moves past Éponine to go his pile of CD’s and find something else.  Maybe they can finally smoke now.

**Author's Note:**

> _fin._


End file.
